Business planning is an extremely enjoyable, ongoing process for me — now. But I remember when it was a struggle, a “should”, something I felt I “had” to do as a business owner, but that didn’t give me much joy. I had spent years creating successful plans as a fund raising professional (quite easily, I might add), but for some reason, I felt a great deal of resistance within me when it came to creating a plan for my own business. That resistance ended up being complex and required a lot of clearing.

Part of my resistance to business planning was because I really loved working with the spiritual laws, and I didn’t want to get caught up in some of the “negative” energies around business and money I witnessed in the material realm. And, of course, I associated business planning with these energies!

But, gradually, my polarized way of thinking changed. Reading this sentence in Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer’s book, Creating Money, assisted that transformation: “It will take less of your energy to attract, save and create more money if you are in harmony with both the spiritual and man-made laws of money.” And, if you’re a business owner, one of the man-made laws of money is business planning. So I set out to develop a business planning model for myself that harmonized the physical and metaphysical laws of commerce.

A Manifestation Tool

Many wonderful dreams and business ideas never materialize because they have not been clearly envisaged and grounded. A written business plan enables you to get very clear about your vision for your business, to ground this vision in the physical world and to align/focus your energy as you act on your plan. It’s a fabulous manifestation tool!

Inspired business planning integrates both the spiritual and man-made laws of business development together. Specifically, it:

– connects you to the higher purpose of your business;

– helps you clarify what you desire for your business;

– supports you in clearing any resistance to having what you desire for your business;

– anchors you in a consciousness of faith and love;

– gives you a space in which to receive guidance from your highest levels;

– translates that guidance into the action steps of your plan, as you discern what business-building strategies to use and structures to put in place that will allow you to receive what you’re desiring; and

– quantifies the financial aspects of your business.

The Seven Steps to Inspired Business Planning

Inspired business planning is a continuous process that will help you develop your business naturally, utilizing both your intuitive and intellectual capacities in an integrative way. As you go through this process, you’ll notice that you feel more balanced and aligned, that the steps to build your business become clearer and you’re more trusting and relaxed about the results. You’ll experience much growth and expansion.

Inspired business planning is a seven-step process:

1) Determine the higher purpose of your business.

From a spiritual perspective, what function is your business meant to serve? What’s your role in the evolution of humanity and our planet, and how will your business allow you to fulfil this purpose?

2) Create key intentions for building your business.

Like clarifying the higher purpose of your business, intentions are part of the “visioning” aspect of your plan. They are the broader goals you establish that will help you fulfil your purpose. What are your intentions?

3) Identify specific objectives and targets you desire related to each intention.

Also part of visioning is defining objectives and specific targets you aim to achieve for each intention. Objectives are more narrowly-defined goals; targets can be both the quantifiable or unquantifiable results you desire. What are your objectives and targets?

4) Tap into your guidance system to determine the action steps associated with each intention and corresponding objective(s) and target(s).

Spending time quieting your mind through meditation or other techniques and thinking/receiving ideas from your highest levels will lead you to the action steps of your plan. What action steps are you guided to take?

5) Clarify your financial inflow and outflow.

How much will it cost you to operate your business, create your offerings and get them out to the world? What level of revenue are you open to receiving on a monthly and/or yearly basis? How will you price your offerings to match that revenue level?

6) Clear resistance that may come up as you create and implement your plan.

Resistance is a belief, thought and accompanying feeling that disallows your natural state of well-being. The intention of building a prosperous, fulfilling business can bring up any number of fearful, resistant thoughts and feelings. These can prevent you from creating a business plan in the first place or from taking the actions your plan describes. What resistant beliefs, thoughts and feelings do you have about creating and implementing your business plan? How can you release this resistance?

7) Operate from love and faith by using prayer, visualizations and affirmations.

When you operate from love and faith, your actions are more joyful and inspired and you more easily attract clients and customers. Prayer, visualizations and affirmations are powerful tools that will anchor you in a state of love, trust and surrender. What prayers, visualizations and affirmations will support you as you build your business?

The real gifts of inspired business planning are in the process of creating the plan and implementing it, without being rigidly attached to the plan or its outcomes. So it’s helpful to remain flexible and allow your plan to change and evolve as you gain more knowledge, guidance, perspective and clarity. Keeping your inner focus on higher essence states such as joy, generosity and gratitude is also important. As Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer say in Creating Money, “the process of getting there is the quality of being there.”

Anchor text is the name used to describe the clickable text that points back to your website. The precise words used and the number of different websites they are used on helps to determine where your website appears in the search results. For instance, for quite a few years now if you search for the phrase “click here” then the Adobe Acrobat reader download page has shown at the top of the results. Not because Adobe are targeting that phrase but because of the number of pages that have told people to “click here” if they haven’t got Acrobat installed.

Because of that very public display of the importance of using precise keywords in the anchor text, there was a time when SEO concentrated on using the keywords that you want to rank for in as many places as possible.

So wherever website owners had control or influence over the anchor text used, they would use the words they wanted their pages to rank for.

Google has gradually got wise to this form of manipulation of their search results which, in turn, has meant that it now expects a mixture of anchor texts pointing to any particular page.

The logic behind this expectation is that most of the time it is unnatural to have exactly the same words pointing to a page – the Adobe example is quite a rare exception to that rule.

Google are looking for a mixture of anchor texts:

Keyword phrases

Business name, sometimes including the town or industry

Business URL – with or without http, with or without www in front

Generic phrases such as “click here”

In addition, it’s perfectly normal for the main URL not to actually be clickable. This happens when webmasters forget to link it or when the software they use for the site gets confused or when the webmaster gets confused and thought they were linking the page but instead simply copied the URL into the page and didn’t notice.

There is no precise science for this and, despite what you may read elsewhere, there is no precise mix of these elements that Google consider natural.

In fact, it would be unnatural if there was a precise percentage of each of this type of anchor text.

In the real world, there will be a range for each of these different possibilities and that range will almost certainly change by industry and quite possibly by country as well.

What that means is that it pays to keep in mind the different possible anchor texts and just use them according to your mood when you are endeavouring to get a link back to your site.

Digressing slightly, some webmasters obsess over whether or not a hyperlink is flagged as “no follow”. They think that such a marking means that the search engines don’t follow the link whereas it is actually a misnomer and is supposed to be used to indicate to the search engines that no PageRank should be passed to the receiving site.

Overall, the important thing is to get a mix of anchor text wordings from a mix of sites and let the search engines figure out the rest.

If you are going to work on SEO, you need to know a lot of different things in order to make your campaign more successful. Since you will be spending your time and money for search engine optimization, you need to make sure that you will get the best results from it. In this article we will be discussing the reasons why you need to use different variations whenever you are building links using anchor texts. Read on to find out how you can further enhance the results that you are getting from your search engine optimization campaign.

Anchor texts are the words that will appear as links that you have created. These may also represent the keywords that you are targeting. For example, if you want to optimize your website for the keyword “Article Marketing”, you need to start building links with an anchor containing the same words. Now, if you want to get better rankings, then you need to start working around your main keyword and create different variations that retain the same meaning. This will not only help you get better rankings, but will also help you increase the number of keywords that you are targeting at the same time.

Once you were able to use different variations for your anchor texts, you will be able to improve the rankings of your website using these keywords. The more keywords you target, the better traffic you will receive from search engines. Aside from this, you will also be able to take advantage of the LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) that most search engines are already using.

This means that your links will appear more natural in the eyes of major search engines, while giving you better rankings for having different variations of anchor texts. Aside from this, Google has released an update called “over optimization” that penalized websites who are perfectly using their main keyword as an anchor text in all their links. Anchor text variations are your only way to protect yourself and your website from getting a penalty which can make or break your business.

It is true that using different variations for your anchor texts will give you better results, but you still need to make sure that you have a professional who can do it for you. Aside from the texts that you are using, there are still a lot of things that should be done in order to be successful with search engine optimization. This is something that you always need to consider whenever you are planning to use SEO for your business. You may not spend a lot of money, but spending more time to look for the best SEO company is very important.